RACHEL MADDOW (HOST): We need to start tonight, of course, with the new red hot relevance of a story that actually -- it feels like it came out a million years ago now because of everything that has happened this week and tonight. But the story that is newly hot in terms of its relevance to the presidential campaign is a story that did just come out on Monday. Monday this week, the Associated Press published a story about the TV show called The Apprentice. AP spoke with nearly two dozen crew members and producers and former contestants from The Apprentice. Some of them went on record and used their full names. Some of them would only speak on the condition of anonymity. It seems like some of that was about people having signed nondisclosure statements. So people did not want to be using their names because they didn't want to be caught breaking their nondisclosure agreements. But on the record and on background, the AP got a very large number of people who had been associated with that show over the years to talk about how Donald Trump behaved while he was the star and central figure in that reality TV show. And what they reported was not good.

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What they're saying in terms of this behavior is that this happened on set, this is how Donald Trump behaved on set during the production of the show. They're saying this stuff never made air, it was never broadcast, but multiple, multiple, multiple witnesses saw it happen on the set of that TV show.

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The reason everybody wants access, not just to what was on TV, but to the production material that went into making that show, the behind the scenes stuff, the stuff that was left on the cutting room floor. The reason everybody is looking for that now and gunning for that now is because of the fact that we shouldn't just have to rely on the statements of multiple people who were there and say they saw it happen. We shouldn't have to rely on the statements of the crew members and the cast members and the people on set in order to check out for ourselves whether these allegations are true in order to assess whether there really is evidence of Donald Trump's very bad behavior in a workplace environment. According to the Associated Press, this story they produced and published on Monday, according to them, we should be able to see Donald Trump's sexist, lewd, borderline harassing workplace behavior because it happened on camera. We should be able to see the tape of it. They didn't broadcast it. But it reportedly exists.

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Now, when this AP story first came out on Monday and since, NBC has referred requests for comment to the production company that actually made the show. They've referred requests for comment to Mark Burnett Productions. When the Associated Press went to Mark Burnett Productions and asked if they could review the raw footage in question to verify these claims from former cast and crew members, Mark Burnett Productions reportedly did not respond. Well today, we have renewed calls to that production company. They wouldn't even give us a no comment. They gave us nothing at all.

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